PhysioToolkit binaries for Linux

This directory contains packages of PhysioToolkit software that have been
precompiled for x86 Linux. Most of these packages are available as
gzip-compressed tar archives (.tar.gz files) and as binary RPMs
(.i?86.rpm files).

If your Linux installation includes RPM, the easiest way to install these binaries is to
download and install binary RPMs. The source RPMs (.src.rpm files) do
not contain binaries, but can be used to create binaries automatically if your
system is equipped with the rpm utility.

All PhysioToolkit software is freely available in source form. You are
encouraged to download the sources, compile them, study them, and modify them
to suit your needs.

Installing the WFDB Software Package from binary RPMs

Beginning with version 10.3.2, the WFDB software package is now available
as five component RPMs (six beginning with 10.3.12); it is no longer
necessary to install the entire package under GNU/Linux. The packages are:

wfdb: the WFDB library, required by all of the others except
wfdb-doc; requires libcurl
(versions 10.3.15 and earlier require
libwww)

wfdb-app: the WFDB applications, with man pages;
requires the wfdb [library] package only

If you have not already done so, download and install the
curl-devel and
XView RPMs. Then install
the WFDB RPMs you have downloaded using a command such as

rpm -Uvh wfdb*rpm

(You will need root permissions to install any of these RPMs.)

This software is also available as a source RPM (see below), or as a gzip-compressed tar archive of
sources. Warning: rebuilding the source RPM will update/usr/lib/libwfdb.so.10and/usr/include/wfdb/*.hto the versions contained in the RPM.

Version 10.2.3 and later packages are considerably smaller than previous
versions, primarily because redundant copies of the figures in the WAVE User's
Guide have been removed in these newer versions (scripts are provided for
generating these figures if needed).

Important note for Fedora and other version 2.6 kernel distributions

Please be sure to install the XView
RPMs for Fedora; the older versions of these RPMs are not stable under
Fedora. The Fedora RPMs should also be usable with RHL 8.0 and later.

If you wish to install a version of the WFDB RPM older than 10.3.0, you will
need to remove the epic package if it is installed. (Red Hat Linux
8.0 includes a new IRC (chat) client called epic. The epic
and the older wfdb packages both include applications installed as
/usr/bin/epic, so they cannot coexist. In WFDB 10.3.0, this conflict
has been resolved by renaming epic as epicmp.)

Alternative methods for installing WFDB binaries

If you don't have the RPM utility, individual binaries may be downloaded from
the wfdb directory. These binaries
were compiled from the WFDB Software
Package, specifically from the sources for the version indicated
as current in the listing below.

The most recent binaries were compiled under Fedora 8 and linked against
glibc 2.7.2 and libcurl 7.17.1. Previous sets of binaries (in
old) were linked against earlier versions of glibc
and libcurl or libwww; these may be usable with older GNU/Linux
distributions.

In order to use any of these binaries, you must have installed the version of
the WFDB library that accompanies them, the appropriate libcurl or libwww
libraries, and (for WAVE only)
the XView libraries.

To install the WFDB library needed by the binaries in bin, you will
normally need root permissions. Download libwfdb.so.10.n,
save it in one of the directories named in /etc/ld.so.conf
(/usr/lib is recommended), cd to that directory, and type:

If you don't have root permissions, install the library into any directory
of your choice, make the symbolic links as above (omit the ldconfig),
and add the name of the directory to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment
variable.